Discussion

I'm all for simplicity but the homepage doesn't say much. I'm left with questions: Who's vetting these developers? What information do I need to provide? Etc. After registering it makes a bit more sense but normally I would have bailed immediately.
Anyone use this for a project?

NOFI, but why would you like to hire a developer for your project in 5 minutes? The whole future of your project depends on that person. It is not like you want a cleaner for your apartment, you are looking for someone to build your apartment.

@timanrebel Good point! It's more accurate to say "start talking to a contract developer you're very likely to hire in 5 minutes" :) Most freelance sites require too much work on the part of the developer as well as the person looking for help. If the variance in quality on the app is low (which is key) then i think should be a good thing for both parties to be able to transact instantly.

The value prop of hiring a developer "in 5 minutes" is a solution for a problem that I've never had.
In fact hiring anyone in 5 minutes (other than for simple data entry) has almost always back fired on me.
Interesting project, none the less.

@rogerdickey@stevebenjamins Great problem if solved properly... very very hard. I think scale will naturally degrade any system. You'll have to remain super small for this to retain the same value, but I think you'll deal with a lot of requests for work.
As such, even if kept small, it seems likely to turn into a place where it's "Match up with a developer in 5 minutes if they like you better than the other 10 people talking to them". Now the 5 minutes is kind of dead, yeah?

@rogerdickey@stevebenjamins supply surplus of developers or *good developers*?
I really don't think there's a supply surplus of great developers out there -- not only is that counterintuitive but it also seems to go against the supply/demand of software engineering hiring right now. No?

@zachtratar@rogerdickey@stevebenjamins supply surplus of "great developers for job X" where job X is a gig that follows well established patterns e.g. "like Reddit but on mobile" , "crowdfunding + instagram", "feature Y that doesn't require remembering graph algorithms" etc. Empirically, these make up a large share of app requests.